this until the newcomer blocked the doorway and began to descend the steps, so deliberately that it seemed not so much careful as gloating. He didn't bother to hold onto the banister with the hand that wasn't flourishing a knife half the length of Charlotte's arm.
He was dressed in hobnailed boots and a butcher's apron: nothing else. His arms and legs and torso were grotesquely muscular beneath a thick simian pelt, which was as black as his ropes of greasy hair. His tread sounded like blows of a hatchet on the trembling steps. Charlotte was striving not to panic but to think whether she should stand her ground and defend herself or try to elude him until she could flee up the steps – she was attempting to overcome the shudder that had reawakened in her brain, shaking her thoughts apart – when he turned away from the steps, and she saw his face.
It was swollen and purple with many veins. Its width made his cracked eyeballs look even smaller. It bore a clown's wide fixed idiotic grin, and the thick lips and malformed nose were drooling. As the man stalked towards her, raising the knife, the hem of the striped apron rose in sympathy, hoisted by an erection sprouting from a bed of matted hair. Charlotte jerked the flashlight up in the hope that it would blind him. While it made his eyes redder still, he didn't falter. The light showed her that his pelt was swarming with parasites, and it revealed another aspect of him. He'd forgotten to bring his shadow, or his creator had overlooked the need.
Either detail might have proved too much for Charlotte. He was an amalgam of nightmares, an overload of them. The fears that constituted him – collected, she thought, in the dreadful bare room overhead – were reduced to nothing but themselves, far less than the victims who'd been forced to suffer them. They had no personality, no substance. They were no better than stale horror stories hollow with cliches, mechanical devices void of any function other than to terrorise. They had nothing to do with Charlotte; how could they have been dredged from her own mind? 'Unbelievable,' she protested in a voice that barely shook, and stepped out of the circle. The instant both her feet were outside, the figure vanished like a bubble that had been pretending it was flesh.
She gazed at the floor where it had stood or seemed to stand, and listened to her heartbeat insisting that she was in more of a panic than she could afford to acknowledge. The bricks within the circle looked even barer for the disappearance – bare enough to be assuring her that the house had finished playing tricks. Perhaps whatever power it had accumulated was spent, having done its worst. The shape that was cowering behind the steps hadn't altered its position; if it appeared to have moved, that was only because the light had.
Charlotte made to lay down the flashlight, and blackness dropped towards her as silently as a spider. It felt as if the ceiling had sagged, and she could do without inviting any threat of claustrophobia. On the floor the flashlight would bring down too much darkness without providing sufficient illumination, she saw now. It would be best left on a step, and she was about to return to the circle when she heard another movement somewhere in the house.
It was a scurrying or scuttling, which suggested rats if not a creature excessively provided with legs. Though her heartbeat was rehearsing her panic again, Charlotte was determined not to be impressed by another vanishing trick. The menace seemed banal, a conjurer's cheapest illusion, too uninspired to be magical. 'No imagination,' she tried to scoff, 'don't put yourself to any trouble' – and then she recognised the sound. The intruder wasn't animal or insect. Earth was trickling into the house.
As she strained her ears to reach beyond the pounding of her heart she was able to locate the sound. It was at the top of the building. Earth must be falling through the skylight, because she heard it strike the attic floor on the way to becoming more muffled as it spilled onto the carpet below. It wasn't simply trickling, it was piling into the house as if somebody were shovelling it in. Its fall didn't quite cover up another noise – a series of creaks that grew louder and more numerous. Was a floor about to collapse? The noise seemed too shrill to be wooden. Just as Charlotte identified the sound of glass under pressure, the highest windows gave way with a clangour that was followed by the thunder of earth filling the rooms. It hadn't lessened when the windows on the middle floor began to creak.
This was too much, Charlotte wanted to believe: not just the windows caving in but the amount of earth that was falling through the skylight. It wasn't her nightmare, it was a version of the terror that had turned upon the occupant of the house. It must have driven him into the cellar once he'd abandoned clawing at the trapdoor to the attic. 'It's all yours,' she cried over the uproar, of which perhaps only her heartbeat was real. The cowering figure shivered, or its shadow did as the beam of the flashlight enacted her nervousness. The movement suggested that the light was capable of threatening the figure, quelling any last remnants of its power. She thrust the beam at the shrivelled crown of the head, and the bony shape reared up to its full height to knock the flashlight out of her hand.
She thought jaws were gaping wide until she saw the entire face was. The beam just had time to exhibit this, and how the denizen of the cellar was beginning to stoop as if to mock her height or to bring its lack of a face level with her eyes, before the flashlight hit the wall. It emitted a flicker that seemed almost taunting and then died for good.
Perhaps the utter darkness was even worse than being buried. It clung like soil to her eyes and seemed to fill her nostrils. Certainly the smell of burial did – thick clay and a staler odour. The sounds of weakened glass and falling earth had ceased as if they'd never been, only to isolate the sound of shuffling in the dark. She'd backed towards the flashlight, but how far? The advance of the footsteps seemed too rapid, not nearly blind enough. She wanted to believe this was yet another trick, but no mere nightmare could have dislodged the flashlight from her grasp. She would never be able to find it before the occupant of the cellar found her, and in any case there was little chance that she could make it work. She would have thrust out the spade to defend herself, but suppose the enlivened remains snatched it from her? She was retreating further when she realised that she didn't even know which way: back into the circle, perhaps. She didn't know why this should aggravate her dread, unless it was stressing her blind disorientation – and then she remembered that she still had light, however meagre. She was almost too terrified to keep hold of the spade with just her right hand while she groped in her hip pocket. She heard the bony shuffling close in on her before she managed to catch hold of her mobile. As she dragged it out, it emitted a pallid glow. Dim though this was, it didn't need to reach far. Her pursuer was within arm's length.
It raised its tattered scrawny arms and ducked its collapsed head towards her face. This was almost enough to send her backwards, which would indeed drive her into the circle. A last flare of instinct made her dodge towards the wall. The figure shuffled swiftly after her, dropping into a crouch from which it might spring on her, throwing her to the floor, where it would begin by lowering its jagged hollow absence of a face towards her. Was this a nightmare it was sending her? She sensed dreadful glee at the prospect of unimaginably worse, and her loathing made her lash out. She hardly knew what she'd done until she felt the spade hack through bone or gristle and saw a shoe and its withered contents left behind.
The lopsided figure hobbled at her with blind determination. When she drove the spade through the other ankle, reducing her pursuer to her own height, it kept coming on its stumps. As it jerked out its shrivelled hands to grapple with the spade she jabbed at its ribs with all her strength, splintering them. The instant it toppled backwards she was on it, tramping on the blade to sever the arms. As the torso struggled like a segment of a worm to elude her, she smashed the skull like a hatched egg. Too much of the body continued to move, not only because of the wild antics of the dim light, even after she'd leaned all her weight on the spade to chop the crawling fragments smaller.
In the end it was disgust with the process that made her give up. As she turned towards the steps she heard a restless scrabbling at the bricks. Surely she'd done as much as she could by herself. 'Ellen,' she called in a voice that hardly seemed capable of escaping the cellar. 'Hugh.' She'd retrieved the flashlight, but it didn't work. Only the muffled glow of the phone lit her way as she stepped into the circle, and the steps weren't visible at all.
EPILOGUE
'Have you finished your new one yet, Ellen?'
'I might have if I hadn't had to come to London.'
'Hey, no panic. Take the time you need. Just don't kill him off at the end. You don't want to keep a good magician down.'
'He wasn't good.'
